Remember how we were told that genAI learns “just like humans”, and how the law can’t say about fair use, and I guess now all art is owned by big tech companies?

Well, of course it’s not true. Exploiting a few of the ways in which genAI --is not-- like human learners, artists can filter their digital art in such a way that if a genAI tool consumes it, it actively reduces the quality of the model, undoing generalization and bleading into neighboring concepts.

Can an AI tool be used to undo this obfuscation? Yes. At scale, however, doing so requires increasing compute costs more and more. This also looks like an improvable method, not a dead end – adversarial input design is a growing field of machine learning with more and more techniques becoming highly available. Imagine this as sort of “cryptography for semantics” in the sense that it presents asymetrical work on AI consumers (while leaving the human eye much less effected).

Now we just need labor laws to catch up.

Wouldn’t it be funny if not only does generative AI not lead to a boring dystopia, but the proliferation and expansion of this and similar techniques to protect human meaning eventually put a lot of grifters out of business?

We must have faith in the dark times. Share this with your artist friends far and wide!

  • @corbin
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    810 months ago

    I don’t care whether you agree with me. I do think it’s quite interesting that my critique of the topic of your post has you replying with personal insults; I think that you’ve incorrectly assumed that I am one of the capitalists who build these models, rather than an anti-capitalist who encourages destroying corporations.

    When this issue is finally settled by law, history will not look back well on you.

    Who are you, Lars Ulrich? Copyright is not compatible with information theory, and so far, information theory has won every contest in the court of public opinion.

    The point is to alter the economics …

    Help defray or establish artists’ funds. Help uncover and prosecute wage theft. Advocate for basic income. If your goal is to remunerate artists, then focus on the efforts which actually help them; don’t support copyright, as it is neither designed nor implemented to help individual artists.

    Shame on you …

    Which one of us is defending a paper which explicitly offers itself as a way for Disney to protect art which it appropriated from artists?